You see workstations like this in what I'd call "interactive simulation." Stuff where you're designing something complex via simulation and want to be able to r

You see workstations like this in what I'd call "interactive simulation." Stuff where you're designing something complex via simulation and want to be able to rapidly evaluate changes. For example ANSYS (hybrid finite element simulation and CAD) works best on a single workstation and you want it to be fast so you can make quick changes. Or when your geometry is so complex it doesn't fit in any reasonable amount of memory and your code doesn't support distributing it (which is very hard for a lot of simulation types). The (Sauber? I think HP sponsors them) F1 car from the image in the article is a good example of someone who might one one of these. A lot of battle-tested engineering software doesn't do distributed-memory parallelism well. I've personally used MCNP and GEANT4 (particle physics software) on a 48 core, 1 TB RAM workstation. It's interesting browsing the web while the computer is running gigantic calculations in the background on two [physical] CPUs, hooray for the process scheduler doing a good job.